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On Friday at 4:00 (CST) the collective bargaining agreement between the NFL and the players’ union will officially expire. The CBA was extended by a week, last Friday, but since the it seems like little ground has been made.

“We all can agree that they’re better off talking than not talking, and so the week extension was a good thing,” NFL analyst Hub Arkush said on the Laurence Holmes Show. “But I think everybody put way too much into it. I think the week extension was as much about both sides knowing what’s at stake, wanting to exhaust all opportunity to get it right, neither side wanting to be the one that insisted on walking away and throwing down the gauntlet and then the hope that something good would come of it, these mediators have obviously done a good job.

“The reports that you’ve heard that the rookie wage scale is done, are completely untrue. They’ve made good progress on it because it’s something that both sides agree on, it was never the issue. It was never going to be a problem.

“When they came up with the extension last Friday, my immediate reaction was: ‘You know what guys? Yes, it’s absolutely great.’ But they’re a billion dollars apart, and that’s what this has a been about all along. Now there were reports [on Wednesday] that maybe the owners had come down to $800 million, hey what’s a couple million between friends. As long as they’re not going to give the players the information they want about why they should give money back, the players are going to be very hesitant to give any money back. So they really aren’t in much better shape today than they were last Thursday or Friday when they agreed to this one-week extension.”